How To Write A PowerPoint Presentation In Five Minutes

We show you how to set up a PowerPoint presentation in Double-Quick Time.

Fire up PowerPoint. You're going to use some SmartArt. The main benefit of this little feature is that it makes everything look so professional everyone'll think you've been working late in the office for weeks.

Make a new slide. Using SmartArt is as simple as clicking “Insert” and then “SmartArt”. It's under the Illustrations section.

There's loads of stuff to choose from. Don't go crazy with pie charts and pyramids and lists and what-have-you just for the sake of it, it'll look messy and tacky, but use them as much as possible where appropriate. You can click and drag things easily to reposition them on the page, change colours under the COLORS menu, change their shape and size and add text to point out what it is.

Depending on what your presentation is on, plug in as much info as you can based on what you're going to say. Everyone's eyes will be melting so much from the pretty pretty diagrams that there's a 95% chance they won't even be paying attention to what you're saying anyway.

What's more, slides with SmartArt make it easy to bluff your way through a presentation. Making a new slide look trendy and brilliant is so easy that it seems silly to hold back, frankly.